Mel Gibson - Edge of Darkness

For the first time in a while I go to the theatre and see a movie. It's Ok but not great. Mel Gibson is creditable but he is certainly not one of my favorite actors. I think this is a picture that tries so hard to tell a good story and reach for the heart strings and though it's entertaining for a Sunday afternoon, in the end it falls a little short.

Obama v. The Republicans

I pleasured in Obama's taking questions from 140 Republicans yesterday. He told it like is more than politicians mostly ever do. He noted that Republicans demonize Democrats so much that it makes bipartisanship largely impossible and that such rhetoric is destructive to the political process. He elucidated the flaws and untruths in the Republican talking points. He reminded them that Bush squandered our budget surpluses and ballooned the national debt.

Such dialogue from the President should continue.

Speak TRUTH to CORRUPTION Brother Obama!

Salinger (2)

My judgement is that J.D. Salinger is overrated. This body of his work is slim. The Catcher in the Rye is a youth cult classic, but as time goes on it has become very dated and stale. I suspect that most young people today have never read it. The Glass family is disturbed and slightly interesting, but not worth much discussion anymore. The Seymour raise the roof high book is incomprehensible. The short stories hold up best. I have read the stories twice and may read them again some day, but not anytime soon despite the demise of the author.

Salinger

Word comes across the internet that J.D. Salinger has died at the ripe old age of 91. Everyone will wonder if he has unreleased material that will be published now.

Paul Krugman: Telling it like it is

January 27, 2010, 6:10 am
The Curse Of The Supermajority
Here’s how democracy works: political parties that make an effective appeal to voters get the right to govern and implement new policies.

Here’s how the United States government works: political parties that make an effective appeal to voters get seated — but can’t govern unless they have 60 Senators.

The past year has been a spectacular demonstration of the crippling effect of the filibuster on America’s ability to deal with, well, anything.

Sen. Tom Udall is proposing a change in Senate rules, going back to the Constitution — which says nothing about supermajorities. Here’s his very good analysis, including a demonstration that the universal requirement for supermajorities isn’t, contrary to what you often hear, isn’t a long-standing tradition; it’s something that only developed recently, and mainly since Republicans found themselves in the minority.

Tom Schaller argues that the supermajority gives American policy a center-right bias, since conservatives don’t want to do much. But didn’t Bush manage to do a lot? Yes, in a way. But the thing about Bush policies were that they were all buy-now-pay-later: unfunded tax cuts, unfunded expansion of Medicare, unfunded wars. Bush never demonstrated that it’s possible to govern America responsibly, because he never tried.

Udall is right. We need to fix the Senate. Otherwise, we’re headed for full banana-republic status.

Dennis Lehane - Shutter Island (2)

This book is what I would call an entertainment. It's a compelling psychological suspense story---absolutely marvelous!

If you take to the story, you turn the pages and you can't stop reading until the end. Books like this sometimes disappoint with the ending, but not this one. The ending is fulfilling.

I can't wait for the movie from Martin Scorsese, due to be released February 19. I'll be there the first weekend.

Scorsese has the material for a "Sixth Sense." I hope he does the book justice. I'll be reporting on the movie first thing.

Dennis Lehane - Shutter Island

I am presently reading and enjoying this novel. I don't read much mass market fiction. Having read and enjoyed this author's Mystic River and having enjoyed the movie, I am reading this one before the movie hits town.

What Ted Kennedy Says...

"If the Democrats run for cover, if we become pale carbon copies of the opposition, we will lose, and deserve to lose."

The Absent Poe Toaster

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January 19, 2010, 2:58 pm
‘Poe Toaster’ Is a No-Show
By RANDY KENNEDY

“There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in his 1845 short story “The Man of the Crowd.”

And since 1949 one such secret has attended Poe’s final resting place in Baltimore at the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, where a black-clad figure has shown up annually early on the morning of Jan. 19, the author’s birthday, to raise a Cognac toast to his grave and deposit three red roses, along with the remnants of the Cognac bottle.

But the visitor — whose identity, or identities, has never been revealed, despite some claims to the contrary over the years — failed to show up this year for the first time, ending a strange crepuscular tradition and disappointing a crowd of more than 30 people who forfeited a good night’s sleep to witness the visitation.

“I was very annoyed,” Jeff Jerome, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House, told The Baltimore Sun. “I’ve been doing this since 1977, and there was no indication he wasn’t going to show up.”

Some conjectured that the Poe Toaster, as the visitor has come to be known, might have just had the flu or car trouble. But Mr. Jerome spoke with Poe-ian air of finality. Last year was the bicentennial of Poe’s birthday, he said. “And if it was going to end,” he said, “that would be the perfect time to end it.”

Progressives Need A Narrative

Progressives need a narrative to displace the false Republican narrative.


Blame Game
What Obama can learn from Reagan.
E.J. Dionne Jr.
view bio
Blame Game The Worst Insult in Politics The Alternative Is Catastrophe January 18, 2010 | 12:00 am 1 comment

WASHINGTON -- In June 2008, before the financial implosions that would come a few months later, I asked two smart financiers who happened to be Republicans about the future of the seemingly shaky American economy.

Defying the moment's conventional predictions that we would somehow muddle through, one of them offered a dire and uncannily accurate forecast. He explained why banks would blow up, investments would crash and the federal government would have to spend "at least $300 billion" to bail out financial institutions.

The other financial expert listened closely, took a sip from his drink, and smiled. "This," he said, "would seem like an excellent time for the Democrats to take power."

It wasn't that he liked the Democrats' policies. He just wanted the other side in charge when things came tumbling down. I doubt that my friend is as surprised as others are over the trouble Democrats face in Tuesday's Massachusetts Senate race that forced President Obama to Boston on Sunday for a last-minute campaign rescue mission.

I have thought often of that exchange while watching Obama and the Democrats struggle with the country's understandably cantankerous mood.

Underlying so much of the self-assured political analysis pouring forth in our multimedia world over the Massachusetts showdown is a debate over the reasons for the decline of Obama's popularity from the heights of last spring.

Conservatives blame it on "liberalism"--big government, big deficits, an overly ambitious health care plan, a stimulus that spent too much and other supposedly left-leaning sins of the Obama regime.

In explaining Scott Brown's strong run for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, conservatives highlight the Republican's strength among independent voters who are said to be alarmed over the ambition and reach of Obamaism.

Obama sympathizers counter that the president's approval ratings are quite healthy in light of an unemployment rate that's gone over 10 percent and a nearly unprecedented destruction of personal wealth.

The conservatives' focus on ideology, they say, is an opportunistic way of distracting attention from the mistakes of the Bush years and the role conservative policies played in bringing us to this point. To cite ideology rather than the economy in explaining the poll numbers is like analyzing the causes of Civil War without any reference to slavery or the rise of the New Deal without mention of the Great Depression.

It's not surprising that I lean toward the second set of explanations, and I wish that my conservative friends would be as honest as the Republican investor was in acknowledging that presiding over bad times always hurts the party stuck with the job.

But the success of the conservative narrative ought to trouble liberals and the Obama administration. The president has had to "own" the economic catastrophe much earlier than he should have. The vast majority of Americans understand that the mess we are in started before Obama got to the White House. Yet many, especially political independents, are upset that the government has had to spend so much money and that things have not turned around as fast as they hoped.

It's also striking that most conservatives, through a method that might be called the audacity of audacity, have acted as if absolutely nothing went wrong with their economic theories. They speak and act as if they had nothing to do with the large deficits they now bemoan and say we will all be saved if only we return to the very policies that should already be discredited.

The few exceptions to this rule--Bruce Bartlett and Richard Posner, the authors of two bravely dissident books, come to mind--find themselves excommunicated from the conservative movement.

Yet the truth that liberals and Obama must grapple with is that they have failed so far to dent the right's narrative, especially among those moderates and independents with no strong commitments to either side in this fight.

The president's supporters comfort themselves that Obama's numbers will improve as the economy gets better. This is a form of intellectual complacency. Ronald Reagan's numbers went down during a slump, too. But even when he was in the doldrums, Reagan was laying the groundwork for a critique of liberalism that held sway in American politics long after he left office.

Progressives will never reach their own Morning in America unless they use the Gipper's method to offer their own critique of the very conservatism he helped make dominant. It is still more powerful in our politics, as we are learning in Massachusetts, than it ought to be.

Bobby and Che

Per the recommendation of Fred, I finally watched the movie Bobby. It is a sterling film. It is a slow, meditative mosaic of some of the people who were there when Bobby Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel. The film leaves me feeling that if I were to meet a historical figure, I would want to meet Bobby Kennedy. Our culture would be better if there were more Bobby Kennedys.

Currently, I am watching part one of a two part movie, called Che, about Ernesto Che Guevara. I think the Cuban Revolution and the overthrow of Batista with the 26th of July Movement is provocative. I wonder what book could be read about this subject.

For the Record

For the record, according to the Nielsen Company, more than 95 percent of the viewers of the Fox News Channel are white.

The Unbelievable Palin

from Andrew Sullivan

13 Jan 2010 11:30 am

How Palin Responds To Factual Criticism
She doesn't. She can't actually disprove or rebut any of the mounds of evidence that she is and was the most ignorant and unqualified person ever put on a national ticket. All she does is deny, deny, deny:

“I had been warned not to watch it,” said Ms. Palin of the “60 Minutes” segment in question. That segment dealt with a new book on the campaign that alleges, among other things, that Palin did not know why North and South Korea are two different countries.

“That is a lie,” said Palin.

Host Bill O’Reilly of “The O’Reilly Factor” said that Palin couldn’t have bested Vice President Biden in a debate if she were really that dumb, and offered her his show as a base for future anti-“60 Minutes” offensives. “You now have a forum here at Fox News where you can immediately neutralize ’60 Minutes’,” Mr. O’Reilly said.

O'Reilly effectively backs Palin's claim on the basis that her crammed, force-fed burbling of talking points in the Biden debate somehow refutes the idea that she hasn't the slightest clue what goes on in the world or the slightest knowledge of history outside of sports. And he is essentially pledging that News Corporation will advance her lies and spin, as it did by publishing her book, and protect her from any real scrutiny that a political candidate deserves.

Since Fox is a propaganda operation and not a journalistic enterprise (Shep Smith excluded), they don't push back. What FNC is giving her is a platform to lie unchecked by any journalistic ethics.

I do not believe that this means she is out of politics. Au contraire. FNC and the RNC are effectively the same operation (and Harper Collins, which published her fiction as non-fiction with no fact-checking or editing is also part of NewsCorp). Her new job is running for office via the chief propaganda network for the red states. The strategy is obviously to focus entirely on the base, demonizing the president and anything he does, exploit economic malaise, and then get back to power on a wave of frightened white ressentiment with Palin as the hood ornament one more time.

I fear her.


The indifference to reality, the cult-like connection with the gun-clingers, the charisma, the cunning, the fraud: this is like a second Bush utterly unleashed from any connection to the GOP's more civil and expansive past, holding a view of presidential power that establishes a national security protectorate for the indefinite future, and total unseriousness with respect to the debt and defusing Islamist terror - rather than provoking it even further.

At least this time, we will have more than eight weeks to vet her. But when a politician believes she does not need to respond to the press, when in fact she now uses the fiction that she too is the press and should be asking questions of others, when the platform she has been given provides her with total immunity from direct criticism along with a megaphone for lies, we are in trouble as a democracy.

She is a symptom of a broken political and journalistic system. She is not a tabloid story. She is a threat.

Carol Felsenthal - Clinton in Exile (2)

According to this book, Bill Clinton is a Luddite. He does not use a computer. He doesn't do email. He has assistants who print out his emails and anything else he would otherwise read off of a computer screen.

Carol Felsenthal - Clinton in Exile

I am reading this splendid book about Bill Clinton's years after his presidency. There is a chapter which talks about the opening of his presidential library in Little Rock which Freddy and I visited a week ago today. The date was November 18, 2004, the opening coming in driving rain. Everything we see around the library today came as a result of locating the library where it is. The library has been a boon to that side of Little Rock. More later.

The Bankruptcy of the Republican Party

Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, typifies the complete and total intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican Party.
From Andreew Sullivan
08 Jan 2010 04:29 pm

Peggy's Predicament
A reader nails it:

Peggy Noonan's biggest problem is that she's not a Republican anymore but she doesn't want to admit it. Like you, Bruce Bartlett, Chris Buckley and myself, she's a conservative - but unlike "us" she is unwilling to completely disengage from the party itself and recognize that it no longer represents true conservative values. But she's too smart to simply regurgitate GOP talking points, so she ends up talking herself into circles.

I think that's about right. But she does at least acknowledge the GOP's bankruptcy and extremism. Which is something,

How Republicans Justify Torture

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good . . . Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race, and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. — Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago.

Cornel West - Brother West (3)

I finish this book less enamored with Cornel West than I was at the beginning. Yes, he's an interesting academic, all over the place, born in Tulsa, raised in Sacramento, having schooled and worked at places like Harvard, Yale, & Princeton. And yes, he may be a great scholar, but I am not convinced. I'd like to hear him speak. Otherwise, I'm left with this memoir, written in a popular voice, written like he's some kind of celebrity. I have some of his books, but I am not sure if I will pursue them. It just seems like he's full of himself, dropping dozens of names in this book, seemingly trying to impress the reader. I don't know; I just don't know quite what to think of Cornel West.

Cornel West - Brother West (2)

I continue reading this memoir. So far I say that Cornel West, author, scholar, public intellectual, is all over the place. He does a lot of name dropping in this book---authors, books, people. He seems to know everybody and to have read everything One amazing thing to me is how important music is to him. It's as if music is just as important in fashioning his thinking as philosophy and theology. He says he keeps David Hume by his bedside. Really? His mind seems to range across so many things. Does he had intellectual ADD?